RICHARD L 



RICHARD L 



speedily compelled Henry to yield to all their demands, and a treaty 

 to that effect was about to be signed when Henry died, on the 6th of 

 July 11S9. Richard was present at the burial of his father in the 

 choir of the convent of Fontevraud. 



Notwithstanding his apprehensions, real or affected, of his brother 

 John, Richard made no particular haste to come over to England ; 

 but, contenting himself with ordering his mother Queen Eleanor 

 to be liberated from confinement, and to be invested with the 

 regency of that kingdom, he first proceeded to Rouen, where he was 

 formally acknowledged as Duke of Normandy, on the 20th of July; 

 and it was the 13th of August before he arrived at Portsmouth (or, 

 as others Bay, at Southampton). His coronation, from which the 

 commencement of his reign is dated, took place in Westminster Abbey 

 on the 3rd of September. It was on occasion of that ceremony that 

 a furious riot broke out against the Jews in London, which was in the 

 course of the next six months renewed in most of the great towns 

 throughout the kingdom. At York, in March 1190, a body of 500 

 Jews, with their wives and children, having taken refuge in the castle, 

 found no other way of saving themselves from their assailants, than 

 by first cutting the throats of the women and children and then 

 stabbing one another. 



A short time before his father's death, Richard and his then friend 

 Philip Augustus, had, as it was expressed, taken the cross, that is to 

 say, had publicly vowed to proceed to the Holy Land, to assist in 

 recovering from the infidels the city and kingdom of Jerusalem, which 

 had recently (1187) fallen into the hands of the great Saladin. The 

 mighty expedition, in which all the principal nations of Western 

 Christendom now joined for the accomplishment of this object, is 

 known by the name of the Third Crusade. Leaving the government 

 of the kingdom during his absence in the hands of William Longchamp, 

 bishop of Ely and chancellor, and Hugh Pudsey, bishop of Durham 

 and justiciary, Richard took his departure from England on the llth 

 of December of this same year 1189, and, proceeding to Normandy, 

 united his forces with those of Philip Augustus in the plain of Vezelai, 

 on the 1st of July 1190. The two friends proceeded together at the 

 head of an army of more than 100,000 men as far as Lyon, where they 

 separated on the 3*lst ; Philip taking the road to Genoa, Richard that 

 to Marseille, where he was to meet his fleet. The fleet however not 

 arriving so soon as was expected, Richard in his impatience hired 

 thirty small vessels for the conveyance of himself and his suite, and, 

 sailing for Naples, arrived there on the 28th of August. On the 8th 

 of September he proceeded by sea to Salerno, where he remained till 

 the 23rd, and then sailed for Messina, which port his fleet had reached 

 about a week before, with the army, which it had taken on board at 

 Marseille. The French king had also arrived at Messina a few days 

 before his brother of England. 



The two kings remained together at Messina till the end of March, 

 1191. During their stay Richard compelled Tancred, who had usurped 

 the crown of Sicily, to relinquish the dower of his sister Joan, the 

 widow of William, the late sovereign, and to pay him besides 40,000 

 ounces of gold. In return he betrothed his nephew Arthur, the son of 

 his next brother, Geoffrey, to Tancred's infant daughter, and formed 

 a league offensive and defensive with the Sicilian king a connection 

 which afterwards cost him dear, for it was the source of the enmity of 

 the Emperor Henry VI., who had married Constantia, the aunt of 

 William, and claimed the throne of Sicily in right of his wife. After 

 the dispute with Tancred had been settled, the latent rivalry of 

 Richard and Philip broke out in a quarrel about the Princess Adelais, 

 whom her brother Philip insisted that Richard should espouse, in 

 conformity with their betrothment, now that his father no longer 

 lived to oppose their union. But if Richard had ever cared anything 

 for the French princess, that attachment had now been obliterated by 

 another which he had some years ago formed for Berengaria, the 

 beautiful daughter of Sancho VI. (styled the Wise), king of Navarre; 

 in fact, he had by this time sent his mother Eleanor to her father's 

 court to solicit that lady in marriage, and, his proposals having been 

 accepted, the two were now actually on their way to join him. In these 

 circumstances, Philip found himself obliged to recede from his demand ; 

 and the matter was arranged by an agreement that Richard should 

 pay a sum of ten thousand marks in five yearly instalments, and 

 restore Adelais, with the places of strength that had been given along 

 with her as her marriage portion, when he should have returned from 

 Palestine. 



Richard, having sent his mother home to England, sailed from 

 Messina on the 7th of April, at the head of a fleet of above two hundred 

 ships, of which fifty-three were large vessels of the sort styled galleys ; 

 his sister the queen dowager of Sicily and the Princess Berengaria 

 accompanying him. The king of France had set sail about a week 

 before. Several months however elapsed before Richard reached the 

 Holy Land, having been detained by an attack which he made upon 

 the island of Cyprus ; Isaac, the king or emperor of which had ill used 

 the crews of some of the English ships that had been driven upon his 

 coasts in a storm. Richard took Limasol, the capital, by assault ; and 

 that blow was soon followed by the complete submission of Isaac and 

 the surrender of the whole island. Isaac was put into confinement, 

 and remained a captive till his death in 1195. Meanwhile the island 

 of Cyprus was made over by Richard in 1192 to Guy of Lusignan 

 upon his resignation of the now merely titular royalty of Jerusalem t j 



his rival Henry of Champagne ; and Guy's posterity reigned in that 

 island till the year 1458. 



Having married Berengaria at Limasol, Richard set sail from Cyprus 

 on the 4th of June (1191), with a fleet now described as consisting of 

 thirteen large ships called busses, fifty galleys, and a hundred trans- 

 ports ; and on the 10th he reached the camp of the Crusaders 

 assembled before the fortress of Acre, the siege of which had already 

 occupied them not much less than two years, and had cost the lives, 

 it is said, of nearly two hundred thousand of the assailants. But the 

 presence of the English king, although he was suffering from severe 

 illness, and had to be carried to the trenches on a litter, immediately 

 inspired so much new vigour into the operations of the Christian 

 army, that on the 12th of July the place surrendered, and Saladin, 

 who had been harassing the besiegers from the neighbouring moun- 

 tains, withdrew in conformity with the terms of capitulation. This 

 great event however was immediately followed by an open rupture 

 between Richard and King Philip, whose rivalry had already exhibited 

 itself in a variety of ways, and more particularly in the support given 

 by Richard to the claim of Guy of Lusignan, and by Philip to that of 

 Conrad of Montferrat, to the vacant crown of Jerusalem. Philip iu 

 fact took his departure from Palestine on the last day of July, leaving 

 only ten thousand men under the command of the Duke of Burgundy. 



Richard performed prodigies of valour in the Holy Land ; but, 

 although a signal defeat of Saladin on the 7th of September was fol- 

 lowed by the capture of Jaffa and some other places of less importance, 

 Jerusalem, all along professedly the main object of the crusade, so far 

 from being taken, was not even attacked. Jaffa however, after it had 

 again fallen into the hands of Saladin, was recovered by the impetuous 

 valour of the English king. At last, on the 9th of October 1192, 

 Richard set sail from Acre in a single vessel, his fleet, having on board 

 his wife, his sister, and the daughter of the captive king of Cyprus, 

 having put to sea a few days before. The three ladies got safe to Sicily ; 

 but the fir.st land the king made was the island of Corfu, which ho 

 took about a month to reach. He left Corfu about the middle of 

 November in three coasting-vessels which he hired there ; but after 

 being a few days at sea he was compelled by a storm to land on the coast 

 of Istria, at a spot between the towns of Aquileia and Venice. After 

 narrowly escaping first from falling atGoiitz into the hands of Maynard, 

 a nephew of Conrad of Montferrat (to whose murder in Palestine Richard, 

 upon very insufficient evidence, was suspected to be an accessory), 

 and then at Freisach from Maynard's brother, Frederic of Betesow, he 

 was taken on the 21st of December at Erperg, near Vienna, by Leo- 

 pold, duke of Austria (a brother-in-law of Isaac of Cyprus), and was by 

 him consigned to close confinement in the castle of Tyernsteign, under 

 the care of his vassal, Baron Haldmar. In the course of a few days 

 however, by an arrangement between Leopold and the Emperor 

 Henry VI., the captive king was transferred to the custody of the 

 latter, who shut him up in a castle iu the Tyrol, where he was bound 

 with chains and guarded by a band of men who surrounded him day 

 and night with drawn swords. In this state he remained about three 

 months. Meanwhile intelligence of his having fallen into the hands 

 of the emperor had reached England, and excited the strongest sen- 

 sation among all ranks of the people. A sketch of the course of 

 events there during his absence has been given in the article JOHN. It 

 is sufficient to mention, that a struggle for supremacy had for sonic 

 time been carrying on with various success between the king's brother 

 John and Longchamp, the chancellor, who had acquired the entire 

 regency, and had also been appointed Papal legate for England and 

 Scotland ; and that this had issued, in October 1191, in the deposition 

 of Longchamp by a council of the nobility held in St. Paul's Church- 

 yard, London ; after which he left the country, and although he soou 

 ventured to return, ultimately deemed it most prudent to retire to 

 Normandy. The supreme authority was thus left for a time in the 

 hands of John, who, as soon as he learned the news of his brother's 

 captivity, openly repaired to Paris, and did homage to the French 

 king for the English dominions on the Continent. 



On his return to England, John raised an army to support his 

 pretensions, and his confederate Philip took up arms in his behalf in 

 France, and, entering Normandy, overran a great part of that duchy, 

 although Rouen, the capital, was preserved principally by the exer- 

 tions of the Earl of Essex, lately one of Richard's companions in the 

 Holy Land. In England also John met with a general opposition 

 to his usurpation of the regal authority, which soon compelled him 

 to conclude an armistice with a council of regency that had been ap- 

 pointed by the prelates and barons. This was the position of affairs 

 when Longchamp, having discovered Richard's place of confinement, 

 after much solicitation prevailed upon the emperor to allow the royal 

 prisoner to be brought before the diet at Hagenau, where accordingly 

 he made his appearance on the 13th of April 1193, and defended 

 himself with so much eloquence against the several charges made 

 against him in regard to Tancred and the kingdom of Sicily, to his 

 conquest of Cyprus, and to the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, 

 that Henry found himself compelled by the general sentiment of the 

 diet to order his chains to be immediately struck off, and to agree to 

 enter upon negociations for his ransom. Longchamp was immediately 

 despatched to England with a letter to the council of regency, and 

 the result was, that, notwithstanding the insidious efforts both of John 

 and his friend Philip of France to prevent the conclusion of the treaty, 





